SAN FRANCISCO — Ice chips scattered around the floor of the Warriors’ home locker room were half melted 30 minutes after they put the finishing touches on a stunning win over the Oklahoma City Thunder.
They showered their head coach, Steve Kerr, with ice water to celebrate, a euphoric cap to their best win since their 12-3 start.
“We need some feel-good energy around here,” Steph Curry said postgame. “We can’t forget to celebrate the small wins no matter what the standards have been around here. And infuse some joy.”
The Warriors and Kerr got inspired by how his alma mater, Arizona, acted after stunning third-ranked Iowa State with a buzzer-beater and overtime performance this week.
For as much as the Warriors and their coach preach playing with joy, there hasn’t been much to cheer recently. After they started 12-3, the Warriors dropped below .500 and have now gone 12-20 since.
But the Thunder win was a reminder that the team that started 12-3 is still in there, somewhere.
Underdogs by 10 points at home, on the second night of a back-to-back and without both Draymond Green and Jonathan Kuminga, Golden State shocked the best team in the West with an all-around effort. Diving for loose balls, flying in for offensive rebounds and executing down the stretch, the Warriors played as inspired basketball as they have in months.
Much of their production came from the veterans. Andrew Wiggins led the way with 27 points on efficient shooting. After being held to four points in the first half, Curry hit five 3-pointers and dropped 17 after halftime. Kevon Looney matched his regular season career high with 18 points. Gary Payton II sliced his way to 15 points and nine rebounds while also putting the exclamation mark on the win with a poster jam on Isaiah Hartenstein.
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“I haven’t been hunting it, but I know I haven’t been up there in a while,” Payton said.
Before Kerr took the podium for his postgame press conference, he changed out of his wet track suit into a blue long sleeve. Even when fielding questions about how difficult it was to contain Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, the MVP candidate who finished with 52 points, Kerr kept it light. When asked about Gilgeous-Alexander’s performance, he jokingly referenced Tommy Lasorda’s infamous rant about a similar question.
Dry and high off a massive win, it was easy to joke around. Easy to humanize his team putting more shots through the net than its opponent.
“Watching the tape of the OKC game that we played on the road earlier in the season when we were rolling, you could just see a bounce in our step,” Kerr said. “There was a look in our eye. I didn’t see that early in the game. We’ve struggled to play with that bounce and that confidence the last month or so. It was great to see us fight through that and then reach that state in the second half. You could see the belief, you could see the energy. It felt like we captured that again, and now we’ve got to sustain it, obviously.”
